A summary of things happening in the OpenStreetMap world

weeklyOSM 428

Mapping

OpenStreetMap Guinea tweeted about the start of their mapping campaign to assist the fight against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

Jean-Marc Liotier noticed that schools in Senegal were converted from areas to nodes by multiple contributors, thereby losing information. He discovered, after some investigation, that this was done because of upcoming elections. The organisation wa mbedni, behind the project “Senegal Vote”, was the culprit. The reason is baffling though: they can’t process surfaces in their software. Someone should explain to them that Overpass API can take care of this in a trivial way. (automatic translation)

On Mastodon, Erwin Olario points to a discussion on the OSM Asia telegram channel about a Corporate Editing Heatmap (source code). The tool was created by Jennings Anderson. It shows the areas where commercial, organised mappers are active. The results can be filtered by year and company.

Community

Simon Poole is surprised that there are more mappers active in OSM in the United States on weekdays than on weekends. Are there more commercial than independent mappers? See the charts at osmstats.neis-one.org for reference.

François Lacombe reports (automatic translation) about the OSM-France monthly project last July to import and survey the power grid (automatic translation) in France and what preparations were involved. The quality control tool Osmose played an important role in the process.

Tomasz_W described his experiment on changing the pastel shades of parks in OSM’s main map style Carto to darker colours.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The Chilean company Altavoz now sponsors the first South American tile cache in the CDN (content delivery network) for tile.openstreetmap.org. (automatic translation)

Humanitarian OSM

Hawa Adinani from Tanzania reports about the completed student training in Dar es Salaam, where 228 sub-wards were mapped to support disaster risk management projects and interventions to clean rivers and drains.

Nate Smith announces a new tool named MapCampaigner, developed by HOT. MapCampaigner’s developers describe it as a “data quality observation tool” intended to follow up on the work done by contributors performing local field surveys tracking specific tags. For example, a report on Botswana flags buildings with missing building:roof or building:levels tags.Critics on the mailing lists respond that this does not address more important data quality issues including those with building geometries, unlike other tools such as Osmose, OSMI, and KeepRight.

Reliefweb reported that the government of Niger partnered with the World Bank and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) to gather data on flood risks in Niamey, Niger’s capital. Data collected included high-resolution images gathered by drones and 15,000 data points, on households and infrastructure, collected with an open source mobile application by Niger’s OpenStreetMap community. The data was used to model the flood risk of the most vulnerable communities in Niamey.

With extensive mapping activity (1,2) taking place in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami which devastated Palu and other parts of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, readers may be interested in an article in National Geographic about the science behind this event. The recent gathered OSM data has been used by UN damage assessments.

Bryce Cogswell (OSM User bryceco), maintainer of the OpenStreetMap editor for Apple platforms GoMap!, announced that the code is now open source on Github.

Daniel writes a diary post announcing the release of RoboSat v1.1.0. Here’s what has changed since the last release: this release is powered by major community contributions ranging from features such as fine-tuning trained models to training and prediction speed-ups, and bug fixes! He also especially thanks to the contributors.

Programming

Heidelberg University received funding for the development (automatic translation) of an app called “meinGrün” (myGreen), that is intended to improve the public perception and information about public green spaces in urban areas.

Did you know …

… Bexhill-OSM? It is a passion project that aims to help people discover information in and around the seaside town of Bexhill-on-Sea. Amongst other features, the map offers pedestrian routing and click-to-query-features.

… ReMAPTCHA? As with every anti-spam mechanism it prevents automated programs (bots) from registering. In addition, the ReMAPTCHA challenge will help to correct unconnected ways in OSM’s data.

OSM in the media

The Swiss TV channel SRF broadcast a short documentary in German about the work done by the Missing Maps project to map remote villages in Africa on OSM and enrich the remotely mapped data by doing local surveys.

Steve Bernard, the design editor at the Financial Times, hosted an AMA on Reddit about cartography and data visualisation.

The Haitian OpenStreetMap community of Saint-Marc has asked (automatic translation) that city hall administration help them count buildings in their municipality. They have to map on a shoestring budget and are in need of funding.

Other “geo” things

Sasha tweeted that even Google’s website developers.google.com produced an error message when they exceeded the quota for their own maps API.

Bike sharing providers in larger cities are starting to move from Bicycle Dock parking to Dockless bicycle rental (88 cities in the USA with this kind of bike sharing). Bicycles integrate a GPS and a geolocation transmitter to a central station with the side effect of generating data on how they are used, which in turn results in cities being able to improve their bicycle infrastructure.

The Belgian Ministry of Defence wants to sue (automatic translation) Google for refusing to blur sensitive areas on its aerial images.

In a tweet Anonymapspoints to HERE’s xyz.here.com/studio/, which offers the upload, management and visualisation of geospatial data. The tweet can be read as a speculation that HERE will enter into competition with Mapbox studio.

Is your Map and Navigation app keeping track of your whereabouts and using it for commercial purposes? (automatic translation)

The local newspaper Böblinger Botereports about the project Elevate of Berlin’s Sozialhelden user group, who also run wheelmap.org. The aim of the project is to provide wheelchair users with information such as the operating status of elevators, which is obviously crucial for them to know ahead of time. Real-time information from the Deutsche Bahn, the Stuttgart S-Bahn as well as the transport associations Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, Region Rhein-Ruhr, and Hamburg will be integrated into Wheelmap. (automatic translation)

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weeklyOSM updates the community, on a weekly basis, about what is going on in the OSM Universe. weeklyOSM is intended for everyone, from experienced mappers to new OSM members. It is created by mappers and OSM enthusiasts. Contributors to weeklyOSM in all languages are always welcome. Due to the enormous workload (52 issues per year, no vacations, no holidays) new languages can only be set up if three mappers agree to cooperate.

The idea of weeklyOSM is to collect relevant OSM news from all over the world, process it and translate it into as many languages as possible. This should help to inform the community as comprehensively as possible and overcome language barriers.

weeklyOSM is independent of all organisations and companies. This applies to OSMF, HOT, FOSSGIS … and all other companies not listed here. Nevertheless, we would be happy if our current issue (in whatever language) would appear on the start page of the Wiki on an equal footing with “Use OpenStreetMap”, “Contribute free map data” and “Software Development”. We would also like to point out that the editorial staff are not subject to OSMF supervision.